Where is the CBC?

I don't know if the CBC will publish my comments, or moderate them, but they deserve to be seen.

The time has come to ask why the halls of power resound with platitudes about Afghanistan and why only these are verily scrutinised with a magnifying glass.

Two pregnant women were killed last week by NATO, the bullets dug out of their bodies, and then recast as victims of some other accident that was locally caused. There was a sense of the- dare I say it- commonplace about this incident. A feeling that this had happened before, and would happen again, to some nameless, faceless scrap of unheralded womanhood, and all because the victim was Afghan, Afghan, Afghan, that benighted ethnicity, cursed for thirty weary, war wracked years.

There was nary a mention from the CBC. Every day the bombs fall, the bodies pile in the heat and the flesh and the stink of Kandahar; every day the sun beats, every day the dogs stroll by. No CBC as the victims trickle blood, no CBC as trafficked young women lie down to service the troops for a scrap of food, no mention even when army officers spirit a prostitute into their quarters and put it on our erstwhile American allies payroll.

No CBC when Afghan children are killed every day in Herat, in Kandahar, in the North and the bombed South, no CBC- as people, girls and boys, men and women, lose their limbs in the most heavily mined country in the world.

Where is the CBC? It is in the House, discussing persnickety little details of a sales tax, it is celebrating with athletes even as bodies are blown a world away in a grisly show that is no less awe inspiring, but better quibble over French being spoken at some never remembered ceremony than whether a little Afghan girl will have half of her face melted off by phosphorous, hair singed, teeth knocked out of her face, her face a permanent stamp, an irremediable mask- of Canada's shame.